Best home cloud server software/OS

[Docretier]

I might get an old computer from my school that was going to be thrown away for the sake of making a personal cloud server at home. What is the best method of doing this? What software/OS is the best for this kind of thing?

[Meic]

Software: I would recommend https://nextcloud.com/ as a personal dropbox replacement and Plex for streaming videos.  Is there any other functionality you are after?

 

OS: Its a bit of a personal preference... I would go for linux (ubuntu) on the server side  but I believe you can run NextCloud on windows.

 

[jde3]

Nextcloud, it's wicked good. The qownnotes app is one of the best markdown note app's I've ever used. https://www.qownnotes.org I keep all my technical notes in there and.. ya.. life would end if I didn't have that cuz.. my memory isn't so good. You can also give google the middle finger and sync your contacts to Nextcloud using the Android app. No reason Google needs that.

 

Personally I prefer Emby over Plex. https://emby.media It has a better UI, it can be used local only mode, it works better with subtitles and it has better live TV support. One gripe I have with Emby is the offline sync to Android could be better. It's not a feature one would use very often but I'd like it to sync my music to my devices but.. so far that feature is kind of buggy when trying to do thousands of files the rest of Emby is great though.

 

For platform FreeBSD makes a good platform because it has native ZFS support on root, but you can do that with Linux as well. Most distros won't install root to ZFS (though it can be done) but they do have kernel modules for adding a separate disk pool. If you start going too far off the rails you may have issues though.

 

FreeNAS/NAS4Free are FreeBSD based NAS distros that have nice web UI frontends.

[Tokyo_Raven]

13 hours ago, Docretier said:

I might get an old computer from my school that was going to be thrown away for the sake of making a personal cloud server at home. What is the best method of doing this? What software/OS is the best for this kind of thing?

I would recommend using OwnCloud. I run it on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with Docker. Works perfectly fine for me.

[jde3]

OwnCloud and Nextcloud forked awhile back under some nebulous circumstances.

 

Quote

I founded the ownCloud project a little over 6 years ago with the goal to enable home users, companies, universities and big enterprises to host their own cloud services and files. In a world with growing threats around security, surveillance and espionage, this idea is becoming more important every day.

 

..

 

I thought a lot about this situation. Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short term money or long term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today?
These questions brought me to the very tough decisions: I have decided to leave my own company today. Yes, I handed in my resignation and will no longer work for ownCloud, Inc.

- Frank Karlitschek

 

When the creator is talking about a "moral question" you have to pause for thought, due to that I went into the Nextcloud camp, and the developments have been really good, I'm very happy with it. @Tokyo_Raven why would you say OwnCloud is better?

[Tokyo_Raven]

1 minute ago, jde3 said:

OwnCloud and Nextcloud forked awhile back under some nebulous circumstances.

 

- Frank Karlitschek

 

When the creator is talking about a "moral question" you have to pause for thought, due to that I went into the Nextcloud camp, and the developments have been really good, I'm very happy with it. @Tokyo_Raven why would you say OwnCloud is better?

I am not saying its better, I am just suggesting it as an option. Works fine for me, OP will choose what suits him best.